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Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

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Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#301

Post by dllthomas »

stouset wrote: post #282
dllthomas wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my understanding that legitimate vote totals aren't likely to conform to Benford's law in the first place. Even if that's the case, though, there might very well be other applicable tests this would run afoul of.

I’m not a statistician so I may be confusing it with Zipf’s law. But IIRC tallies from individual precincts should roughly conform to Benford’s law.

I think the concern is that precinct size tends to cluster in ways that mean results can cluster in ways that - for a large portion of the data - does not span a full order of magnitude.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#302

Post by culi »

eirikbakke wrote: post #285
culi wrote: post #246

No one has yet to post the actual official statement by the CNE. It doesn't seem too unlikely that they had a total vote count as well as the percentages for each candidate and released those. It feels like people are jumping to some major conclusions in this thread

Here is the CNE press conference where the numbers were announced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB7g4y4M4s8

Wonderful, thanks! I really struggled to find this. Funnily enough they give different percentages. 51.1% to 44.2%

round and round we go

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#303

Post by lumb63 »

yongjik wrote: post #172
nikolay wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen any preliminary results announcing numbers of votes - it's always rounded up percentages with 1 or 2 decimals.

In my country (Korea) they broadcast vote counts, per district, in real time as data pours in from all over the country. It's a big entertainment going on for the whole night. And you can log onto the website of the office of the election commission and see raw numbers by each voting district. It's 2024; I'd consider it a minimum level of government competency if anyone wants to be called a democratic country.

As an American, boy, do I have news for you…

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#304

Post by motohagiography »

notjoemama wrote: post #84

I recall having read about elections in Africa and the troubles they faced. I can't find it now, but there was one particular website offering a very detailed but rigorous approach to determining the legitimacy of elections. I'll offer this article from the BBC as a stand in for the criteria (from 2016): https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-37243190 Vote rigging: How to spot the tell-tale signs 1. Too many voters 2.…

I have family who volunteered as international election monitors and these are the criteria they used as well. Ironic, really. I've been against electronic voting for over a decade for the same reasons.

It's a ritual that if you don't do it correctly and with integrity, you get challenges to the results. Only question is how those challenges manifest.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#305

Post by wrsh07 »

gmaster1440 wrote: post #69
dinobones wrote: post #22

Here's this re-explained with a simpler example. Imagine you have 1,000 votes. You want to show that your political party got 60% of the vote, so, you claim: My party: 600 votes Opposition: 300 votes Other: 100 votes Presto, we got a good breakdown. The people will buy it.... It makes sense that 600 is exactly 60% of 1,000, because this was an artificial example. But in the real world, we don't get 1,000 votes. We ge…

If I'm in charge of forging a presidential election, how difficult is it for me to use realistic, "ugly" numbers to sell it more effectively?

Hard. Naively, run the election, use real vote counts, claim that you're the one that got more.

Ok but now we need to fake this on a local level. But everybody knows people in this district are more Party A and in that are more Party B. Well.... let's correct for that...

If you want to give top line numbers, fine. Credible local numbers would get really hairy

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#306

Post by olalonde »

culi wrote: post #298
olalonde wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems Maduro was way behind in the polls. https://www.as-coa.org/articles/poll-tracker-venezuelas-2024...

Depends which polls you're looking at. So far, no non-US-linked pollsters have shown Maduro behind (that is, behind the US backed opposition candidate). If you look at something like Hinterlaces you get a very different picture

According to this Venezuelan news article[0], several did:

> Well-known pollsters in the Venezuelan political sphere, such as Datanálisis, Datincorp, Delphos, and Consultores 21, along with the emerging Poder y Estrategia, indicated that Urrutia had more than 50% of voting intentions.

[0] https://www.lapatilla.com/2024/07/15/la-guerra-de-encuestas-...

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#307

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

stouset wrote: post #282
dllthomas wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my understanding that legitimate vote totals aren't likely to conform to Benford's law in the first place. Even if that's the case, though, there might very well be other applicable tests this would run afoul of.

I’m not a statistician so I may be confusing it with Zipf’s law. But IIRC tallies from individual precincts should roughly conform to Benford’s law.

Precints have roughly even populations and therefore typically don't conform to Benford's law. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etx0k1nLn78&t=76s&pp=ygUQYmV...

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#308

Post by bjourne »

The most important part of the article is buried in the PS:es:

> Commenter Ryan points out that you could also explain this data pattern as a result of sloppy post-processing, if votes were counted correctly, then reported to the nearest percentage point, and then some intermediary mistakenly multiplied the (rounded) percentages by the total vote and reported that. I have no idea; you'd want to know where those particular numbers were coming from.

Author has no idea about how the vote counting process works, yet he spreads FUD. There are many plausible reasons why the tallies are "suspiciously well-rounded". The result was announced when it, according to the Venezuelan electoral commission, was clear that Maduro had an insurmountable lead. The cutoff point may just have been 51.2% with less than X% of the votes remaining. We don't know how their statistical modelling works.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#309

Post by IAmGraydon »

aaplok wrote: post #98
gmaster1440 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm in charge of forging a presidential election, how difficult is it for me to use realistic, "ugly" numbers to sell it more effectively?

In light of recent analyses of suspicious elections (Iran, Russia, Venezuela), it seems harder than it sounds to avoid discernible patterns. On the other hand, the goal is to get away with fraud, not to convince an international community who will likely look for any confirmation of their suspicion. It would be interesting to look for patterns in a (presumably) fair election like the recent British one for comparison…

>It would be interesting to look for patterns in a (presumably) fair election like the recent British one for comparison.

Someone should run this same analysis on all the election data they can get their hands on. Who knows what might be found.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#310

Post by dllthomas »

drexlspivey wrote: post #197
worstspotgain wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have the "right" to have a revolution too - many countries treasure the revolutions they had. They can amend the constitution and make another democracy. They can also amend the constitution and make a dictatorship. Or just have a dictatorship without bothering. Those do not need constitutions at all. To have a vote that turns a democracy into a non-democracy is a meta-democratic vote, not a democratic vote. Abu…

A dictator is just someone with absolute power. How he got the power is orthogonal. He doesn’t have to gain power through insurrection or a revolution, he can gain it inside a democratic system. In fact in Ancient Rome, where the term comes from, the Dictator was appointed by congress in times of crisis.

> Dictator was appointed by congress in times of crisis.

A dictator was appointed by a consul, at the direction of the Senate, with the job of solving a specific problem.

The history of the dictatorship in ancient Rome, before Sulla, is really interesting, and differs quite a bit from the popular understanding: https://acoup.blog/2022/03/18/collections-the-roman-dictator...

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